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My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

mark.mcnally.je

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Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#451

Post by noduerme »

rualca wrote: post #419
noduerme wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just really wanted to launch my software. Which when I began coding it, seemed completely legal and possible in Costa Rica. As the laws started to change - and even before Bitcoin came on the scene - I looked for how to do it without running afoul of anything. So it's not like I set out with a plan to exploit all the legal loopholes in the world, I just adapted my code and split it apart as necessary. I never even…

> I just really wanted to launch my software. Come on. Cut the bullshit. > Which when I began coding it, seemed completely legal and possible in Costa Rica. As the laws started to change - and even before Bitcoin came on the scene - I looked for how to do it without running afoul of anything. So it's not like I set out with a plan to exploit all the legal loopholes in the world, I just adapted my code and split it ap…

What you say I stated "unequivocally" is precisely the opposite of what I stated. I was quite clear - what I said was that I didn't want to pursue the business into a legal gray area. Therefore, I did what I had to do to keep it legal, including turning away 95% of the hits, retaining lawyers, and not violating any local laws. Moreover, it would have been perfectly legal to run the whole thing from Costa Rican servers at any point in time. I just didn't see a future in it, because they didn't offer full licensing, and the credit card companies pulled out while the software was in alpha. The IoM paper was intended as a step on the road to licensing.

I didn't exploit anything. I worked within the legal options that were available. In any case, I don't understand the accusation.

My only regret is that I didn't have the capital to buy a full license in the IoM or Malta outright. But the truth is, I wrote the whole thing from scratch and I was determined to launch it. You're free to your opinions, but you ought to avoid judging people's intentions while misreading their words.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#452

Post by NetToolKit »

nostrademons wrote: post #207
NetToolKit wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now you can get single servers for ~$4K with 4T of RAM Does the $4K include the cost of the RAM? Where can I find these servers? Thanks!

I just Googled [servers with 4T of RAM], but apparently no, it does not include the RAM itself. Came up with this (about $4K base, another $44K to max it out with RAM): https://www.broadberry.com/dual-amd-epyc-rackmount-servers/a...

Yeah, I've been eyeing the EPYC servers, but RAM pricing seems to very roughly be in the ballpark of $1,000 for 128GB, so $4k for 4T sounded very attractive and I wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing anything. As cvwright pointed out, you can get old DDR3 RAM for less, but I haven't found servers that can fit that many DIMMs. Thanks for your response.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#453

Post by NetToolKit »

Kranar wrote: post #206
NetToolKit wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now you can get single servers for ~$4K with 4T of RAM Does the $4K include the cost of the RAM? Where can I find these servers? Thanks!

The more I read comments on subjects I am intimately familiar with, the more I realize most people who comment on HN don't really know what they're talking about and mostly make things up. To answer your question, you can't find these servers because they don't exist. A server with 4T of RAM will cost you at a minimum $20,000 and that will be for some really crappy low-grade RAM. Realistically for an actual server th…

Thanks for your response. Your numbers are better than what I came up with, but I thought I'd check just in case I was missing a great deal somewhere.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#455

Post by Waterluvian »

rollcat wrote: post #400
Waterluvian wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the thoughtful analysis and napkin math. You may very well be right. I wonder if this is true in practice or if they suffer from any interface abstractions and whatnot.

On every modern (past few decades) platform, the mouse cursor is a hardware sprite with a dedicated, optimized, *fast* path thru every layer of the stack, just to shave off a few ms of user-perceived latency. Grab a window and shake it violently, you'll notice it lags a few pixels behind the cursor - that's the magic in action. In some places there's no room left for unnecessary abstractions, I can imagine most of th…

I wish this was true with Ubuntu but every time I boot up is a dice roll on if my mouse will be sluggish and low -FPS or not.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#456

Post by BackBlast »

Zababa wrote: post #107
dreyfan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Broadly speaking people on HN have no clue how to setup a performant httpd/app server and are impressed by abysmal performance/cost metrics like this or the MangaDex post. Everything these days is obscured through multiple layers of SaaS offerings and unnecessary bloat like kubernetes. ~10k rps (it was concurrent connections but close enough) was state of the art in 1999. Now 22 years later ~50 rps is somehow impress…

> ~10k rps (it was concurrent connections but close enough) was state of the art in 1999. Now 22 years later ~50 rps is somehow impressive. I honestly don't understand how that can be true. I'm not suggesting you're lying of course, but when you put it this way it's almost like people are actively trying to slow their programs down. I have a few ideas on why that might be the case (switch to slow interpreted language…

The best/fastest web servers today manage >600k rps on a single server [0].

django is on that list, near the bottom, at 15k. Clearly his request response is more complicated than a simple fortune.

There are a few factors I've experience here. Interpreted languages have encouraged development patterns that are slow. Ease of allocating memory has tended to promote its overuse. Coding emphasis has been heavily weighted on developer productivity and correctness of code over lean and fast.

I find that poor web server configurations are pretty common. Smaller shops tend to use off the shelf frameworks rather than roll their own systems. Various framework "production" setups often don't include any caching at all. Static files are compressed and then sent on every request instead of preserving a pool of pre-compressed common pages/assets/responses. It's like the framework creators just assume there's going to be a CDN in front of the system, and so they don't even try to make the system fast.

The latest crop of web devs have very little experience setting up production systems correctly. Companies seem more interested in AWS skills than profiling. Then you have architectural pits like microservices. Since there is so little emphasis on individual system performance it seems that it has become or is becoming a lost skill.

Then there is so much money being thrown at successful SaaS that it just doesn't matter that their infrastructure costs are potentially 50x what they actually need. It seems that the only people squeezing performance out of software are the poor blokes who are scrimping by on shoestrings with no VC money in sight.

[0] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#457

Post by Waterluvian »

WanderPanda wrote: post #335
kragen wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The running-sum-difference approach suggested above is a box filter, which has the best possible noise suppression for a given step-function delay, although in the frequency domain it looks appalling. It uses more RAM, but not that much. The single-pole RC filter you're suggesting is much nicer in the frequency domain, but in the time domain it's far worse.

Is it „far worse in the time domain“ due to its infinite impulse response?

Reading all of you sounding super smart and saying stuff I don’t recognize (but perhaps utilize without knowing the terms) used to make me feel anxious about being an impostor. Now it makes me excited that there’s so many more secrets to discover in my discipline.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#458

Post by noduerme »

zschuessler wrote: post #429
noduerme wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent 3 years writing the software in my spare time, and launched it on the $20k I had in savings... personally bankrolling the games. When I began the alpha phase, you could still get an "information processing" license to run a casino in Costa Rica that would allow you to host gambling and which the credit card companies tacitly accepted and would do business with. (Those gambling payments to shady jurisdictions…

This story is fascinating. What ended up happening with the project, did you at least break even? I would read a book about this, fwiw.

Thanks. I ended up shutting it down around 2013, for a few reasons. One was that large casino software had moved into Bitcoin space and I couldn't compete against companies that were licensed in a way that allowed them to advertise. I wasn't making enough money from it to be worth waking up all hours to handle bug reports and manage the community, while also worrying about my bank account and keeping an eye on Bitcoin fluctuations. And another reason was that the platform / "gaming OS" was built around opening resizable/dockable windows for multiple games inside a single browser tab, meant to run full screen, and written completely in Flash AS3. By 2013 it was apparent that the front end platform was going to have to be completely rewritten for mobile, either native or JS. The site actually had run on iphone and droid before the flash plugin was removed, although it wasn't optimized for touch. But canvas drawing tools to do the kinds of things it did were in their infancy; things like a variable speed embedded video with a 3d ball physics simulation overlayed for the roulette table would probably be hard to accomplish even now. The headaches associated with running tech support, mostly alone on a daily basis, while also holding down a regular job and caring for a sick partner, made the idea of porting half a million lines of code daunting to say the least. And at the end of the day, without an injection of capital to license and white label the software, it wasn't really worth it.

So I went down a rabbit hole of trying to license the software for in-room gaming on cruise ships and Vegas hotel casinos. But Bally and Caesars pretty much dominated that space... if you even want to get a new game certified by the Nevada Gcb you have to put $100k down, non-refundable, for them to review the software (per game) and then they might start a review in a year or two. Bally gets to cut the line. I also had trouble trying to patent my original games. And of course, the world was coming closer to a consensus that Bitcoin would have to be regulated. So one day, I refunded all my players their balances and turned off the lights.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#459

Post by noduerme »

hnbad wrote: post #351
noduerme wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect your anger derives from the fact that this would not be possible to get away with now, in any way shape or form, only ten years later. And truly the world is way more locked down now than it was then when people were like, "Bitcoin? What's that? you want to pay me to write a legal brief?" so, yeah. I feel sorry for kids ten years younger than me. When I did it, the only thing I was really afraid of was gett…

I'm not angry, I'm hostile. That you think the only possible position from which to take issue with what you did is FOMO speaks volumes. I'm not arguing that you violated any laws. You made it very clear that you went to great lengths to avoid doing anything that could have resulted in consequences to yourself. EDIT: Since HN's rate limiting won't let me reply for a few hours, I'll just address the replies inline: I'…

Also I want to add... I had a feature on the site from day one that would let players set their own deposit limits through any date they chose. Once set, the limits could not be raised or revoked through that date, and any coin they sent beyond the limit would automatically be sent back. This was prominently displayed on the website along with an entire section of problem gambling resources. Some users did use it. Others I would put into the system involuntarily. The average rake on my non-poker games was about 2.5%, and some of the puzzle games I designed had a theoretical >100% payout if you could, e.g., solve a randomly spun Rubik's cube consistently in under 60 seconds. (No one ever hit over 100% on that one over time, though. If I had ever come across anything like that I would have written a bot to solve it... and I was waiting for a player to do so, so I could make them a partner).

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#460

Post by planet-and-halo »

tristor wrote: post #432
planet-and-halo wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any recommended reading? I've bought a few things in that vein but I'm self-taught and always looking to improve on the ops/perf side.

I don't have any one complete book that I can recommend, and I don't even really have a great reading list for this. But I'll make an attempt to share what I think is useful as a starting point. 1. Systems Operations is first and foremost about understanding systems, in all of their complexity, which means understanding the internals of your OS primarily. 2. Performance and networking, in particular, are super import…

Appreciate the recs. Thanks very much for taking the time to write a detailed response.
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